Chris Selley: Turning teachers into clock-punchers

Turning Toronto's teachers into clock-punchers

This hasn’t been a great week for public education in Ontario. Chris Spence, the high-profile director of education at the Toronto District School Board, was outed by the Toronto Star as a plagiarist; and then by the National Post as a plagiarist of astonishing prolificacy and brazenness. (Would you believe he took a conversation about the Newtown school shooting between a St. Louis Post-Dispatch writer and her seven-year-old son, and presented it in the Star as one he’d had with his own son? My jaw is still sore from when it hit the desk.)

Meanwhile, as Premier Dalton McGuinty continues to burn up on re-entry into private life, his erstwhile best friends at the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario were planning to stage an illegal one-day strike — they call it a legal protest. And having had a new contract imposed upon them, they still aren’t “volunteering” to provide students with extracurricular activities that are, let’s face it, an integral part of their jobs and utterly essential to healthy student life. (You can read all about that in Mr. Spence’s Jan. 5 op-ed in the Star, or at the various sources from which he purloined it.)

What’s most galling is not that teachers aren’t providing extracurriculars. It’s that they can’t — not without facing sanctions from their union, including fines and public shaming. When recently I expressed by disgust at this state of affairs on Twitter, I was lambasted by people suggesting that if teachers don’t want to toe the union line, they should teach at a private school or find another career. This is good practical advice in the short term, I suppose, but the aggressive sentiment towards people who simply want to do their jobs baffles me.

If you ask me, teaching is one of society’s highest callings. Aside from family and friends, teachers provide children with some of their earliest memories and most important foundational experiences. Furthermore, the sort of teacher we idealize is the polar opposite of a union clock-puncher: This ideal teacher is tireless, and cares about nothing more than his students’ achievement and happiness. He’s there early in the morning offering extra help and late in the evening coaching or supervising a club.

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He is, in short, a very hard-working professional. For a union or anyone else to tell a hard-working professional that he can’t do his job as he conceives it, even if he happens not to share a particular grievance or agree with a method of protest, is infantilizing in the extreme.

It’s one thing when we’re talking about manual labour. But public school teachers are entrusted with the very future of our society, which is why they ought to be treated with the utmost respect by taxpayers, by government, and by their unions. Fining them because they want to work is not respect.

Union supporters will say, “Hey, it’s a democracy. Apostate teachers can try to change the system from within.”

Say that’s true, for the sake of argument. In the meantime, why should those of us on the outside be sanguine about the situation? When people say “go work in a private school then,” they’re basically saying they don’t care if a teacher who places his job and his students above all else leaves the public school system. Good riddance, boat-rocker! For people who are passionate about public education, that’s a very weird sentiment indeed.

The good news, as ever, is that Ontario public schools are not in crisis. They place well on the global rankings. Thus the impetus for reform is not as urgent as in, for example, some American states that have experimented with charter schools. But this extracurricular boycott could conceivably last for several years, and the kids it affects won’t get another shot at a proper education.

Every week that boycott remains in place, and every day teachers thumb their noses at their students and the rule of law by walking out, makes a case — more or less out of whole cloth — to loosen the union stranglehold on public education in Ontario.